How To Market Your Business With Webinars

If you’ve ever been to one of our webinars, you’ve seen how useful they can be when it comes to delivering content to an audience. The word “webinar” is an amalgamation of the words “web” and “seminar” — basically a presentation you give to an audience over the web.

With clear instructions and educational webinars, people are more likely to sign up for your information, buy your product and/or stay with your business.

What Webinars Can Do For You

And webinars work great for a variety of situations. Have a service based business (like us!) where people have to set up an account and work through your site? Conduct a webinar detailing how that is used.

Have a new product that you’re launching? Set up a demonstration of that product and how people can benefit from it.

Want to educate your audience on a particular topic that is important in your industry? Run a session that covers that topic, as well as solicits feedback from your audience to spark conversation.

Setting up and running is easy, so long as you are willing to put forth the effort and follow a few simple steps, outlined below.

Steps For Setting Up And Running A Webinar

1. Platform

There are a lot of different services out there to help you run a webinar, ranging from free ones (up to a certain number of attendees) such as AnyMeeting or paid services like GoToWebinar. There are plenty of services out there, so be sure to explore your options and pick the right one for you.

2. Equipment

Most desktops or laptops now a days will have no problem running any of the above software, and the next thing to think about is hardware. Audio is key when you are giving a presentation, so you don’t want to skimp in that department.

That being said, good audio quality can still be achieved without spending hundreds of dollars. Blue Microphones makes a great mic for under $100 and it can be plugged right into a USB port. Or you can go for the gusto, and get a sound board/mic setup from Apogee.

Web cams are available for low prices as well if you are looking to have a ?face? to your webinar.

3. Content

Most webinars will have slide show, and that slide show should act as an outline of sorts — not only as an outline for your audience, but for yourself as well. Text on the slide show should be kept to a minimalistic, bullet point format.

These points should highlight the key takeaways for each section, so that the viewer can, at a glance, pick up the main points of your talk. This kind of format also helps keep you on track.

Images can be added to slides to throw in a little bit of visual flare, or images can consist of graphs and/or charts that support your talking points.

4. Email

This is AWeber, of course email had to be thrown in here! But seriously, email is a great tool when combined with your webinar. Most webinar software includes the ability to send out pre-webinar email reminders, but you can use your AWeber account to create a series of pre-webinar emails, with recordings of your webinar, a copy of the slides and other calls to action — like promoting viewers to buy your product or sign up for your service.

What’s Next?

The next step is to get ideas together and research some of those webinar platforms, and find one that’s right for you. From there you can promote your webinar on your site, on Facebook and/or via Twitter.

If you’d like to learn more, and if you live in or around the Philadelphia, PA area, AWeber will be hosting a live meetup on August 15th, at 6pm EDT right here in our offices, taking a more in-depth look at setting up and running a webinar for your business. We’d love to see you there!

Have you run a webinar in that past? Feel free to share your experience in the comment section below!